Coyote Waits (6 page)

He closed the hood and walked down the slope through the snakeweed to Pinto’s outhouse. The raw planks used to build it a lifetime ago had shrunk and warped. Through the gaping cracks Leaphorn admired Pinto’s view while he urinated — a grand expanse of tan-silver grass and black-silver sage sloping down Blue Moon Bench toward the cliffs of the Colorado River Canyon. On the way back to the house he made another stop at the hogan that adjoined it. It was round and windowless, built of stone, its tarpaper roof insulated with a layer of earth. Leaphorn pulled open the board door and peered into the darkness. He saw an iron cot, boxes, an old icebox apparently used for storage, nothing that looked interesting.

Nor was there anything interesting under Ashie Pinto’s brush arbor — just an old bridle hanging from a crossbar, the bit rusted, the leather stiff and cracked. Leaphorn took it down, looked at it, hung it back where he’d found it, yawned. A wasted day, he thought. The only useful thing Leaphorn could think of that might be found here was something that would tell them how Pinto got from here on the western fringe of the Big Reservation over to Ship Rock territory. Probably at least two hundred miles. Someone with a vehicle must have taken him. Logically they would have sent word they were coming. Probably mailed to Pinto at the Short Mountain Trading Post. Possibly, as Mary Keeyani believed, this letter would have been saved in Pinto’s repository of documents.

“When you just get maybe one letter a year — or maybe just eight or ten your whole life — then probably you save them,” Mary Keeyani had explained. True enough. He walked back to the house.

In Leaphorn’s experience, men who lived alone tended to be either totally sloppy or totally neat — one extreme or the other. Ashie Pinto was neat. From his vantage point leaning against the doorjamb, Leaphorn could see everything in the living room-bedroom of Pinto’s two-room house. The bedstead stood on the cracked and worn linoleum, a blue-and-white J. C. Penney blanket folded across it; beside the single window, a three-drawer chest, beside the chest an armchair, the upholstery of its back and seat water-stained; a metal-and-Formica table, two wooden chairs; a tall cabinet with double doors which, since the room had no closet, must hold Pinto’s spare clothing. There was nothing on the table, nothing on the chairs, nothing on the bed, but the top of the chest held a cigar box; a framed photograph which seemed, from Leaphorn’s viewpoint, to be of Pinto himself; a large wash basin of white ceramic; and something flat, black, and metallic.

Mary Keeyani was looking through the drawers of the chest and Professor Bourebonette was making clattering noises in the kitchen.

“A tin box?” she said. “Square or round?”

“Round,” Mary Keeyani said. “I think a fruitcake came in it. Maybe cookies.”

Leaphorn struggled with his sense of official decorum on one hand and his curiosity on the other. What was that atop the chest? He reached a compromise.

“Mrs. Keeyani. What’s that black thing on top of the chest there? Beside the cigar box.”

“It’s a tape recorder,” Mrs. Keeyani said. She retrieved it, came to the door, and handed it to him with a plastic sack containing five cassettes. “My uncle did a lot of that. Taping stuff for those
biligaana
he worked for.”

Professor Bourebonette appeared in the kitchen door. She displayed a round tin can with a cluster of red roses decorating the lid.

“That’s it,” Mary Keeyani said.

The tape recorder was of the bulky, heavy sort sold about twenty years ago. It contained a cassette. Leaphorn pushed the play button. He heard the faint sound of friction recorders make when running over blank tape. He pushed Stop, and Rewind, waited for the reversing process to stop and pushed Play again.

The speaker produced an old man’s voice, speaking in Navajo.

“
They say Coyote is funny, some of those people say that. But the old people who told me the stories, they didn’t think Coyote was funny. Coyote was always causing trouble. He was mean. He caused hardship. He hurt people. He caused people to die. That’s the way the stories go that I was told by my uncles when I was a boy. These uncles, they say . . 
.”

Professor Bourebonette was standing beside him. Leaphorn pushed the stop button, looked up at her.

“He was doing that for me,” she said. “I asked him for that story. I wonder how far he got.”

“Ashie Pinto? For your book?”

“Not really. He told me he knew the original correct version of one of the Coyote myths. The one about the red-winged blackbirds and the game they play with their eyeballs. Throwing them up in the air and catching them, and Coyote forcing them to teach him the game.” She glanced at Leaphorn, quizzical. “You know the story?”

“I’ve heard it,” Leaphorn said. He looked at the tin she was holding. “Are you going to open Mr. Pinto’s box?”

Bourebonette read into Leaphorn’s tone some hint of disapproval. She looked at the box and at Leaphorn and said, “I’ll just give it to Mary. She’s his niece.”

Mary Keeyani had no qualms. She worked off the lid. Inside Leaphorn could see a jumble of papers: envelopes, receipts, what seemed to be a car title, odds and ends. She put it on the table where she and Bourebonette sorted through it.

“Here’s a letter from me,” Bourebonette said, extracting an envelope. “And another one.” She glanced at Leaphorn. “That’s all of them. We didn’t do much business by mail.”

Mary Keeyani stopped sorting. “Here’s all he has in here for this year,” she said. She displayed two envelopes. “No use going back any further than that.” She extracted a single sheet of notepaper from one envelope, read it, slipped it back into the envelope, and dropped it back into the box. She repeated the process, put the lid on the box, and stood, looking disappointed.

“Nothing helpful?” Bourebonette said.

Nothing helpful, Mrs. Keeyani had agreed. Nothing that would tell them who had driven out here over this awful rocky track and hauled an old man across the Reservation to commit a murder. Leaphorn drove carefully over that rocky track now, sorting out his reaction to this. It was what he had expected, or should have, and yet he felt disappointed. Why? He hadn’t thought a search through Pinto’s documents, if he had any, would be revealing. But if you give luck a chance, sometimes it rewards you.

His real hope was in finding a witness. The FBI seemed to have decided its case was made and hadn’t looked for one. And strange vehicles came so rarely down these tracks — which were really little more than miles and miles of shared driveways — that people remembered them. A visit from a stranger to anyone on your side of the mountain was exciting. But, unfortunately, Ashie Pinto’s place, even though it was four miles from the road, was the first place on this track. Mary Keeyani’s outfit, where he was about to park now, occupied a little cluster of shacks with a shared hogan, out of sight more than a mile down the slope. It was only by chance that one of the children out with the sheep had noticed the dust raised by the vehicle that took Pinto away. There had been no one else to see it.

Leaphorn stifled a yawn. It was almost sundown. A long day. He was tired. He had driven more than two hundred and fifty miles, and two hundred and fifty miles with two strange women is more exhausting than that distance in the relaxing solitude to which he was accustomed. And before he was done with this day, he had to drive another four hours back to Window Rock. A day wasted. Nothing accomplished. Well, almost nothing. He stopped the car beside Mrs. Keeyani’s house, a weathered mobile home set on concrete blocks. At least, he would get rid of this sense of family responsibility — and get rid of these two women — when he wrapped this up.

So wrap it up.

“Mrs. Keeyani,” he said, “who all had Hosteen Pinto worked with? I mean in recent years. Besides Dr. Bourebonette.”

Mrs. Keeyani was sitting beside him, getting her stuff together.

“He used to work with a man from Tucson. Somebody named Dr. Drabner. But not this year, I think. And then there was an old professor from the University of Utah. I don’t remember his name but he spoke pretty good Navajo.”

“I think that was a Dr. Justin Milovich,” Bourebonette said. “He was into linguistics.”

“Milovich,” Mrs. Keeyani said. She climbed out of the car, where three dogs greeted her with much tail wagging, jumping, and rowdy enthusiasm. “That was him.”

“Anyone else? That’s it?”

“Nobody else I knew of.”

“How about that history professor from the University of New Mexico?” Bourebonette said. “Tagert. How about Tagert? Hosteen Pinto used to work with him a lot.”

“Not no more he don’t,” Mary Keeyani said.

Her tone and her face raised a question and Professor Bourebonette asked it. “Something happened?”

“He would give my uncle whiskey.”

“Oh,” Bourebonette said. “The son-of-a-bitch.” She turned to Leaphorn. “When he drinks he just about kills himself.”

Or someone else, Leaphorn thought.

“I told that man not to ever give my uncle any whiskey but he did it anyway,” Mary Keeyani said. “So when the last time he wrote my uncle a letter about working for him, when my uncle brought it to me, I wouldn’t even read it for him. I just tore it up. And I made my uncle promise not to work for him any more.”

“When was that?” Leaphorn asked.

“Last year. Way last spring a year ago.”

“When was the last time he heard from Milovich or Drabner? Can you remember?”

“Long time for Milovich,” she said. “Drabner, I think it was last winter. Maybe even last fall. It was that letter in the box.”

They were back on U.S. 89, Bourebonette and he, rolling southward toward the Tuba City junction, when the turnoff to Short Mountain reminded Leaphorn of Old Man McGinnis and his Short Mountain Trading Post.

He slowed, looked at Bourebonette. “I’m thinking of that bottle of whiskey Ashie Pinto had. The bottle he had when Chee arrested him. Remember what Mary Keeyani said about that New Mexico historian giving him booze?”

“I thought about that, too,” she said. “Maybe Pinto picked up his mail himself, and there was a letter from Dr. Tagert and Ashie didn’t let Mary see it. Maybe he got somebody else to read it for him and help him answer it.”

“Exactly,” Leaphorn said, pleased with her. “Maybe not, too. But didn’t the Pintos do their trading at Short Mountain?”

“That was his mailing address.”

“Let’s go check.”

The road from Highway 89 to Short Mountain Trading Post was a little better than Leaphorn remembered it from his days as a patrolman working out of Tuba City. It had been improved by gravel and grading from terrible to fairly bad. Leaphorn maneuvered the patrol car back and forth across its washboard surface, avoiding the worst of the bumps such roads develop. It was twilight when they dropped down into Short Mountain Wash and parked on the hard-packed earth that formed the trading post yard.

It was empty. Leaphorn parked near the porch, turned off the ignition and sat. He had brought Emma here once, long ago, to see this place and to meet Old John McGinnis. He’d described McGinnis as he’d known him, honorable in his way but notoriously grouchy, pessimistic, perverse, quick with insults and overflowing with windy stories and gossip. Over the front door nailed to the porch beam a faded sign proclaimed:

THIS ESTABLISHMENT FOR SALE
INQUIRE WITHIN

The sign had been there at least fifty years. According to local legend, McGinnis had hung it there within weeks after he’d bought the store from the Mormon who’d established it. The legend had it that young McGinnis had been outsmarted in the deal. Those who knew him found that incredible.

“He’s rude,” he’d told Emma. “No manners at all and he may snap at you. But look him over. I’d like to know what you think of him.”

So, of course, McGinnis had been courtly, charming, full of smiles and compliments, showing Emma the best of his pawn goods and his collection of lance points, pots, and assorted artifacts — perverse as always. Emma had been charmed.

“I don’t see why you say those bad things about him,” she’d said. “He’s a good man.”

As always when it came to judging people, Emma was correct. In his prickly, eccentric way, John McGinnis was a good man.

Leaphorn was aware that Professor Bourebonette had glanced at him and glanced away. He supposed she was wondering why he was just sitting here. But she said nothing, and made no move to open her door. Willing to wait, sensing the value of this moment to him. He found himself favorably impressed with the woman. But then this sort of sensitivity would be something one in her profession would polish — part of their technique for establishing rapport with those they need to use. How long would her formula cause her to wait?

Cold evening air settling into Short Mountain Wash pushed a breeze across the yard, moving a tumbleweed languidly toward the porch. A water barrel stopped it. The buildings here had looked tired and decrepit the first time he’d seen the place. In the red light of the sunset they looked worse. A plaster-and-stone building behind the main post had been partially burned and left unrepaired, the shed where hay was stored leaned to the left. Even the porch seemed to have sagged under the weight of age and loneliness.

Now a naked light bulb hanging over the trading post door went on, a feeble yellow glow in the twilight.

“Well,” Leaphorn said. “He’s ready to receive a customer. Let’s go talk to him.”

“I only met him once,” Bourebonette said. “He helped me find some people. I remember he seemed fairly old.”

“He knew my grandfather,” Leaphorn said. “Or so he claims.”

Bourebonette looked at him. “You sound skeptical.”

Leaphorn laughed, shook his head. “Oh, I guess he really did know him. But with McGinnis—” He laughed again.

The front door opened and McGinnis stood in it, looking out at them.

“After closing time,” he said. “What you want?”

He was smaller than Leaphorn remembered — a white-haired, bent old man in faded blue overalls. But he identified Leaphorn as soon as he climbed out of the car.

“Be damned,” McGinnis said. “Here comes the Sherlock Holmes of the Navajo Tribal Police. And I betcha I can guess what brought him out here to the poor side of the Reservation.”